By Divine Will
by ashangel101010
Summary: Armitage Hux just wanted to survive his final. Ben Solo just wanted an angel to show him compassion. Shiraya gives them each other.


By Divine Will

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Suggested Theme:

Main Theme- Distant Sky by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds feat. Else Torp

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The room is black and bleeds red light; it smells like acrid chemicals and stress sweat. The boy, with his red and white arms, is suspended a half meter from the metal grate floor. His arms are stretched above his head and bound together with cold chains. He wishes he could pull himself up and put his burning face against the chains; he wishes for the cold to soothe his swollen right eye and his partially broken nose. He wants to see and breathe easily again.

 _Twenty hours and fifteen minutes. Hmm, can I make it to twenty-four?_ The boy slightly shakes his head to unstick his sweat-plastered, red locks. He bites his tongue for the tenth time today to stop himself from instinctively screaming when the Lamproids decide to squirm another half centimeter into his legs.

 _Force, every time they move, they just aggravate the chemical burns even more! Force, you'd think these little fuckers would give up after eight hours! There's not much meat on those bones, you little shits!_ The boy does his best to remain as still as possible, not wanting to encourage the feral worms. He should pass-out if only to shorten his inevitable hospital stay by minutes, but he does not want to give up now.

 _I'll be the first cadet in Academy history to make it to twenty-four hours! I'm not going to pass that chance up! But I'm going to need to go further back into my mind; the pain is becoming unbearable again!_ Throughout the torture, the boy would divorce himself from his body and retreat into his mind when the pain was too much for him. He learned this helpful trick from his father a long, long time ago.

 _I keep going further and further in my mind. What if I go too far? Can I become cationic if I keep doing this? Father never fully explained, but, then again, he never got to. I wonder if he's used this trick after we left, make the pain of our parting lessen. Maybe he's in an eternal slumber like Sleeping Beauty and can only be revived by True Love's kiss. And he's being guarded by Angels. Maybe that's what the Commandant meant when he said, "Your father is with the Angels." Because he's not a prosy man; he's blunt and made of grunts. If father was dead, he would've told me so._

His mind is dark and speckled with small lights like stars in space. His father told him that the small lights in his mind are the Force. He said that everyone has the Force, but most cannot wield it. And that's for the best. The Force, Ashla and Bogan, are compassionless, bored troublemakers. _"The Force gives power, but that power whittles away your mind."_ He always associate Emperor Palpatine's demise with that quote.

 _I could stay here forever. Just look at the Force-stars in the endless darkness!_ The light of his Force stars twinkle dully. He likes to believe that if he gets too far into his mind the Force stars will darken, warning him to turn back now. But he hasn't seen that happen so far.

 _I can't really tell how far I've gone in my mind; I've been here for…I don't know. Space without suns, moons, and planets doesn't give a time to a Force-null like me. It's an acceptable cost if I'm spared pain, but I hope time hasn't passed too much out there. I'd hate to wake up forty hours into the final exam!_ He laughs, but he hears no sound in his mind resembling laughter. There really is no sound here.

 _All I have are the Force-stars out here and—the one in the front got brighter! The rest of them are dull still, except this one. What does that mean? Have I gone too far and this is my body offering a small warning?_ He turns to head back to painful reality, but he sees the one bright Force-star. And it gets brighter. He turns back around and sees the Force-star again. And it gets brighter.

 _What!? No matter where I turn, the Force-star is in front of me! And it gets brighter…Force, what does this mean!? Isn't going into the light normally a bad thing since it means you're dead? But I can't get away from it! I guess…I went too far for too long._ The star gets brighter even when he's not moving anymore. He moves toward the light, feeling oddly complacent for his fate. For this unknown.

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Ben Solo is by the mirror-gray lake on the isle where Sith Lord Exar Kun's temple used to stand. The temple used to stand as majestically tall as the Great Temple, but it was made of black obsidian bejeweled with polished corusca gems. To a younger Ben Solo, it was the most beautiful temple on Yavin.

And like all beautiful things in his life, his family destroys it. His uncle and Master used his X-wing's proton-bombs and lasers to render the temple into gravel. _If only I had detected him following me that night, the temple would still be here. The dark, forbidden piece of art soothed me better than the voice in the night, and it didn't inspire such awful things in me!_

He still comes back to the remains of the temple when…..the Force overtakes him. _But it's you; it's your choice to hurt the people around you! The Force tears your mind apart and makes your patience snap in a hair's breadth, but you could've stopped yourself from lashing out at the new, talented Initiate! But you don't have the control that Jedi have. You don't have the goodness that Jedi have. You're no good! You're a monster! THAT'S WHY MOMMY AND DADDY ABANDONED YOU—_ Ben falls to his knees and clutches his head in pain of the truth that his wounded mind spits.

"I know, I know! I just want….." Ben sobs, giving up on defending himself against the truth. _Who the kriff nearly breaks the hand of a six-year-old just because she's more Light than you!? Just because everyone welcomed her more openly than they did you! WHAT THE SEVEN SITH HELLS IS WRONG WITH YOU!_

"Everything…..everything is wrong with me! My nose and lips are too big for my mole-ridden face! I can't even design a functional lightsaber! My uncle thinks I'm a fuck-up. My parents think I'm a problem. None of my classmates can bear to hang around me. And…..And I want to….I want to….." _Kill them all, but if I say that, then I'm truly beyond salvation!_ Ben digs his broken nails into his scalp to give himself pain for having those murderous thoughts. He digs deeper and deeper until the pain becomes unbearable; he pulls his hands away from his head and sees bloody crescents under his fingernails.

He claps his giant hands together and intertwined his dirty fingers into a prayer.

 _Please, Shiraya, just give me….give me someone. Give me an angel. Please, give me an angel who…who empathizes with me, or who can at least offer me compassion. Please, please, give me an angel!_ Ben Solo prays to the ancient moon goddess of Naboo in the twilight. He even bows seven times before the lake, copying the act of submission one pays to Her in his family. Or at in his Naboo side.

When he lifts his face from the lake's black-pebbled shore, he sees someone standing in the lake's shallows. His eyes widen and his lips curl into a childish smile because he believes that maybe Shiraya has answered his prayer. Has blessed him with an angel. A tall angel with short, flame-colored hair.

But then he looks closer and screams in horror.

His _angel's_ legs are burnt pink with _worms_ as long as serpents shifting under the fatless, burnt flesh. Blood is dripping out of the ruddy skin beds where the nails, fingers and toes, used to be. The right eye is swollen like a giant purple pus, while the left, an icy blue, is dilated like it's desperate for light.

The ginger parts his cracked lips and his shriveled, pink tongue swipes at his lips, trying to give his lips some kind of moisture. But the tongue only gives tiny flecks of pink flesh to the dry lips.

 _This is not the angel I imagined receiving!_ Ben finally thinks and his brown eyes well up with tears; he does not know if the tears are formed from his revulsion or sympathy. _Why isn't he dead!? Why isn't he DEAD!?_

He almost wants to use the Force and—

His malformed angel is able to move; he strains his right foot through the still water and then his left. Ben gapes as his angel is able to walk, like a starved, baby gualama, through the shallow lakeshore and onto the unforgiving pebbles. Ben knows that even those rounded pebbles must be adding more tears to the bottoms of his angel's abused soles.

He feels his heart wrench violently like a dying hyperdrive. _He's coming towards me! He's making his way to me! Pfassk, PFASSK! SHOULD I JUST RUN AND GET SOME HELP!? SHOULD I JUST KILL HIM? PUT HIM OUT OF HIS MISERY!? No, I'm a Jedi! I'm supposed to help people! And he needs help! HE NEEDS ME!_

Ben moves better, quicker than his tormented angel. He closes the distance between him and his angel like an Alderaanian cygnet taking flight for the first time. His muddy, brown boots ghost over the black pebbles.

He does not touch his angel at first; he's afraid that any touch from his clumsy paws will break his angel's bones. His angel falls against him and he weighs less than the pebbles beneath his bleeding feet; Ben slowly, delicately encircles his arms around his angel's middle. He's terrified that if he puts any pressure in his hold, then he'll cave in his angel's heaving ribs. His angel's heart is beating rapidly like a ticking bomb; Ben almost wants to press a kiss onto the heart, onto the one of his angel's few pure patches.

"…You have such a pretty nose!" His angel speaks for the first time, and it's like hearing a nexu being skinned alive. His voice is crackly like horror static and brittle like aeon-old bones. His angel's legs give in like the act of speaking has robbed what was left of the angel's life.

But he feels his angel's hand, thin and nail-less, clutch his back, letting Ben know that he's alive. But just barely.

"I'll save you, my angel! I swear it by Shiraya's Crescent. I _shall_ save you!" Ben speaks to his angel's still-beating heart. The angel says nothing, but he refuses to relinquish his grip on Ben's back.

And Ben uses the Force to make his angel slightly hover above the ground like an abused wraith. Ben never releases his hold on his angel and simply just shifts his angel's position a bit, so he can see beyond the angel's heart.

He sees the mirror-gray lake and the black pebbles; there's a drying, fading trail of red from where the angel stood moments ago. He then turns his back on the lake and heads to the broken lip of the isle. There used to be a volcanic wall that separated this dark isle from Yavin's natural green jungle.

Ben steps into the lush jungle, leaving a small fraction of his self-loathing behind. His angel merely holds onto him and breathes in the fresh, jungle air. He hears a thought emerge from his angel, tinged with white happiness and blue tears.

 _I'm with an Angel!_

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 **Author's Comments-** Happy Valentine's Day and Festival of Love (which is the _Star Wars_ version of our Earth holiday, kind of like _Life Day_ just with more boys needing hugs and therapy) to everyone!

I wrote this with no intention of actually submitting it on the holiday of "love" but I finished in time. And, yes, this story is just one massive contrivance with how Hux got to Yavin, possibly through divine intervention, but I, at first, intended this to be just a darkly-comedic one-shot. I might make a series out of this. Because I just love the thought of a Jedi Ben Solo trying his best to care for his angel, and, Force, does Hux need some medical attention! But, luckily or unluckily, he has a semi-stable Ben Solo to be his caretaker. At least, he'll be well-fed!


End file.
